War and Memory

Memorial Day, 1970: I was soldier in Vietnam. By 1970, almost 48,000 American soldiers had been killed. Anti-war protests were wide-spread and growing in number as the protesters were attempting to wake up the nation and stop the war.

Memorial Day, 2010: 4404 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq; 1000 Americans have died in Afghanistan. And the nation sleeps.

This Memorial Day, politicians across the country will spout words about heroes, sacrifice, and patriotism, then return to their divisive partisan politics while the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan continues on its bloody way. This Memorial Day will be just another way for businesses to lure shoppers into their stores for “Memorial Day discounts.” Some will advertise discounts in “honor” of those who have given their lives. How does shopping “honor” a soldier? As soldiers in Afghanistan have said “We’re fighting a war while America is at the mall.”

The root of “memorial” means “memory,” and “preserving remembrance.” It is right and fitting that we celebrate those who fight, and have fought, for our nation. But if Memorial Day is only a momentary look at our past, then it is worth little. If the celebrations do not cause us to consider, and question, the actions of our government and how our soldiers are currently being used, then they mean no more than the smoke that disappears in the aftermath of an IED explosion.

“So,” you might ask, “what is the best way to support the troops?” Do what you can to first rouse yourself, then wake up our sleeping nation. Must we be fighting an endless war (as the Bush administration liked to call it)? How many more of our sons and daughters in uniform must die before, as in Vietnam, we say “enough” and withdraw our troops?

I believe the best way to support our troops is to bring them home. But whatever your answer might be, don’t forget them or their families now or after they come home. Coming home is hard. A soldier returning from a war zone faces tensions and conflicts as he or she tries to move back into civilian life. But the new veteran has to learn that there is no going back; war changes those who fight, and life changes those who wait for the soldier’s return.

ICDP's Tim Caldwell featured in CM Life article for Vietnam memoirs

Our own Tim Caldwell - who posts as JT here on the Dispatch - was featured in an article in Central Michigan Life today.

"We live in a society that demands disclosure: This is mine," said Caldwell, a music professor and Vietnam veteran.

Caldwell's book "The Chaplain's Assistant: God, Country, and Vietnam," tells of things that happened to him, other soldiers and things that never really happened during the war.

"That's how I make sense of the world - through writing," Caldwell said.

John Barker is also quoted in the article. I hope to get a copy of the book soon!

Thoughts on Veterans Day, 2007

In 1950, when I was five-years-old and living in a small town in Kentucky, my first contact with anything military happened when my next-door neighbor, Mr. Abbot, gave me a disarmed shell he had brought back with him from World War I. Not long after that, my mother took me to a parade where Mr. Abbot and other old men paraded down the main street of town wearing uniforms. Mom told me that the men had been soldiers when they were a lot younger. As I looked around, I saw men take off their hats and put their hands over their hearts as the American flag passed. I noticed several of them were crying.

All over the country on that particular day, Mom said, there were parades like this one. It was a special day called Armistice Day. Personally, I was disappointed because I had assumed there would be clowns and animals–maybe even elephants–in the parade. Why else would people be excited about a parade, and why would men cry because a flag passed by?

Jump forward to November 11, 1995. I was standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City with my grown-up son as we watched veterans from all American wars since World War II parade up Fifth Avenue. It took more than an hour for the parade to pass us. There were lines of cars carrying vets who were no longer able to walk. Some groups of veterans had tried, without much success, to organize themselves into discernible marching units. The desert camouflage of the veterans of the recent Gulf War looked peculiar to me, mixed in, as they were, with the solid colors of the uniforms from the other units.

But the groups that affected me the most were the veterans of the war in Vietnam. That was my war, a war that I had tried, unsuccessfully, to put behind me for so long. Tears blurred my eyes as I peered through the telephoto lens of my camera, hoping to spot a familiar face although I knew there was little hope in finding anyone I served with in 1970. Even if I had recognized them, I doubted they would recognize me. The twenty-five years that had passed had changed me from a cynical, sarcastic draftee into a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and expanding paunch, who would not be ashamed to stand on the steps of St. Pat’s silently weeping for the all the soldiers who had died in that unnecessary war.

My son put his arm around me and asked if I was okay. I told him that I was, but I didn’t say that I was immeasurably sad when I thought of what my beloved country had lost in that war: all the young men and women who had died, and the millions of veterans who had survived physically but who had never truly “come home.”

On Veterans Day this year, I will once again feel the sorrow of loss, but also a burning anger. When I consider what the warmongers in Washington have done with the lives our sons and daughters in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what these new veterans face when they return home, I am filled with rage. When I think about the impotence of our elected officials of both parties to end this senseless war, and when I hear the drumbeats for starting yet another war in Iran, despair washes over me. Will we never learn?

For most of my fellow citizens, this Veterans Day will pass unobserved as have so many others. But if there were a parade in Mount Pleasant on this Veterans Day, and if a five-year-old boy saw an old man with his hand over his heart and tears running down his face as our flag passes by, he would be looking at me.

Debate Over Bush’s “Surge”

This is, as Yogi Berra said, "This is like deja vu all over again." Writing as a Vietnam vet, what is going on in Iraq bears an uncanny resemblance to the fall of Saigon. Bush wants to send in more troops to prop up the puppet government, but can’t say how he will tell if the surge succeeded or not. I suppose it will succeed because he will say that it has. Maybe he can land on that carrier again and announce “Mission Accomplished” one more time.

When I was in Vietnam, my buddies and I often said that Nixon could end the war by saying that he had won, then just leaving the country. He more or less did indeed do this a few years later, during which time a few thousand American lives and untold Vietnamese lives were lost. Bush is in the same position in Iraq.

What nobody seems to be talking about is where he plans to get the 21,000 additional troops. All branches of the military–excepting the Air Force and Navy perhaps–are already stretched to the breaking point. There are very few new bodies to be had. Soreserves are being put on alert, some after having just returned home after tours of duty that were extended by months or years. There are reports of troops in Afghanistan having their tours involuntarily extended and being told that they will be part of the surge in Iraq.

All of this for what reason? Bush will get his “surge,” the situation will remain as it currently is, or more likely worsen, and then what? Because neither he nor his Republican lads in Congress have any clear plans, they drag out the tried and true charges of lack of patriotism, “if we don’t fight them there, we’ll be fighting them here” (which is one of my favorites), and the laughable concern that we will lose credibility with our allies and the nations of the world. As if the administration and Republicans are not already the laughing stock of the world.

What about a failed state in the Middle East? The Republicans like to shake that skeleton. The nation of Iraq was a construct of the British after WW I, and like every other construct, it needed a ruthless dictator to hold it together. Enter Saddam Hussein. What country buttressed Hussein's power for decades? The U.S. What has happened to every other nation constructed of warring tribes who are forced to live together by a foreign military? They fall apart. So there is already a failed state in the Middle East: Iraq. Who caused it to fail? All the presidents who supplied the dictators with their military power-base. George II is not bright enough to know that by removing the dictator who held the country together was tantamount to pulling the central thread from the garment. He's been watching Iraq unravel ever since, and our valiant troops have paid the price for his arrogant stupidity.

For the U.S., the concern should be how to spare any more American casualties and yet leave some shred of hope for the weak central government, but historically, puppet governments rarely have lasted once the U.S. has left unless the U.S. left the country in the hands of a military dictatorship (this is what happened at the beginning of the 20th century in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Haiti). There is no strong Iraqi military because the Bush folk got rid of the generals and officers who controlled Hussein's military because they were Bathists. That was one of the first blunders they made. But I digress.

So will Bush get his “surge?” Probably. Will it make any difference in the level of violence or make the Iraqi government more capable of surviving after we leave? Probably not. If the U.S. withdraws our troops, will the government collapse? Of course. Will the government collapse if we withdraw quickly? Yes. Will it collapse if we withdraw slowly? Yes.

Fast or slow, the troops must come home. The sooner, the better.